


The Oasis

by elle_stone



Series: Halloween Fright Fest 2018 [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Gen, Minor Bryan/Nathan Miller, minor implied violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-09 04:47:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16443200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: Murphy kicks at a clod of dirt and sends it soaring up toward the scarecrow. It flies through the figure's old black coat and hits the post, and the whole thing tilts even more precariously to the side. "Hey," Bellamy warns, and reaches out his hand as if to hold Murphy back. "Leave it alone.""Why?" Murphy shoots back. "You really think there's anyone left out here," he holds out his arms, takes in the wasted fields and the pale sky, "to give a fuck?"Four survivors of the nuclear apocalypse find refuge in a farmhouse and receive aid from its two inhabitants.





	The Oasis

They reach the farmhouse at dusk, the sky above a nearly uniform gray, bright pink oozing into red at the horizon. The fields are barren. Emptiness stretches from the road to a line of overgrown trees in the distance, broken only by the farmhouse itself, and by a scarecrow, slightly tilted on its post, its ragged clothes flapping in the light autumn breeze.

They've been avoiding the cities, where the radiation is bad, and sticking to the countryside that escaped the worst of the bombs. They have become used to desolation. To emptiness, and vastness, and abandonment. 

Murphy kicks at a clod of dirt and sends it soaring up toward the scarecrow. It flies through the figure's old black coat and hits the post, and the whole thing tilts even more precariously to the side. "Hey," Bellamy warns, and reaches out his hand as if to hold Murphy back. "Leave it alone."

"Why?" Murphy shoots back. "You really think there's anyone left out here," he holds out his arms, takes in the wasted fields and the pale sky, "to give a fuck?"

"Kane said there were survivors out here," Bellamy reminds him, but Murphy just rolls his eyes.

"Kane said a lot of stuff."

Bellamy opens his mouth to reply, but Monty cuts him off. "Will you two just stop?" He sounds weary, weighted down with a full day of walking, two nights in a row of sleeping out on the ground. "We're almost there. Either way—let's just keep going."

"Yeah," Jasper adds. He rubs at the back of his neck like he's working out a knot, a gesture he's taken to often now, just as he often bends his head to watch his own feet moving steadily over the ground. "Worst case scenario, there are people there and they shoot us on sight."

He doesn't sound as if he considers this a terrible fate. But no one presses the point. 

They adjust their backpacks and head out across the field, Bellamy a little ahead, the others right behind. Another breeze, deep autumn cold and brisk, gusts past them, and the scarecrow twists and tilts again on its stake. They don't hear or see many animals anymore, at least not ones they can still recognize from the time before, but as they approach the farmhouse, the distinct sound of a crow cawing breaks across the sky. A stark, bleak sound. They each turn on instinct, searching out its source, but see nothing but the clouds shifting overhead, the light seeping slowly from the sky.

*

They store their main arsenal in the basement, but of course it is necessary to keep a rifle by the door, in part for times like these. Miller twitches apart a gap in the curtains to look outside. "Four men approaching," he says, his voice low.

"Armed?" Bryan asks. He's standing just behind Miller, one hand on his lower back, peering around him to see what he can through the narrow gap.

"Can't tell. Probably."

Miller can hear the slight smile in Bryan's voice when he adds: "Or stupid." 

He moves his hand an inch lower, a slow slide. Some days this is the only sort of communication between them, the only communication they need. Miller nods and reaches for the rifle. Bryan pulls out the drawer from the table by the door, takes out a pistol, tucks it into the back waistband of his jeans.

They wait until the newcomers are almost to the door, then Miller kicks it open and strides out onto the porch, rifle poised and ready, staring at them through the sight. The four men stop five paces from the front steps. Three of them put up their hands, and then the fourth, the tallest and the skinniest with short buzzed hair, holds his up too. He brings his gaze up slowly, and stares at Miller with a look that might be knowing or just dead-eyed: these days it's hard to tell.

"We're here asking for help," the man in front says. He has the sort of booming voice that carries. It startles the stillness of the field.

"Why should we help you?" Bryan asks. He's standing next to Miller on the top porch step, arms crossed, confident in the high ground.

The first man, the leader, hesitates. He's still standing in a posture of surrender. A hard wind disturbs the loose shutter on the second floor and it cracks against the side of the house like a rapport.

"We're friends of Kane's," he says, finally. "Do you know Marcus Kane?"

"I do, yeah," Miller answers, but he doesn't set his rifle down. "I didn't know he was still alive."

That's an old life. His soldier's life, his brief spasm of belonging, before—

"He is," the newcomer says. "He told us to look for you. Nate, right?" He says the last with some uncertainty, takes a brave step forward, then falls back when Miller trains the rifle back on him. 

"Miller," he corrects. "What do you have on you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Weapons. Food. Supplies."

_Offerings_.

"A few guns," the small band's leader answers. "Not many bullets. Some food, but we mostly gather as we go."

"Some tech," another of them adds, and Miller can hear Bryan, next to him, make a small, interested noise underneath his breath.

"We're just looking for a place to stay," the fourth man says; he's the sullen-looking one who attacked their scarecrow, and Bryan lifts his eyebrows in a low, amused way. "Just for the night."

Miller hesitates. He's convinced by now they're not about to come into the house guns blazing. He can't believe they have the ammunition to waste on foolishness like that. Neither does he. Just as he's about to lower the rifle, he feels Bryan's fingers skim across his hip, and he knows they're on the same page, and he stands down.

"Do you eat of the Earth?" he asks.

"We're still alive, aren't we?" the man in front answers.

"Do you eat the animals?"

The man shakes his head. "Those creatures? No."

Miller nods, curt, but doesn't say anything more.

"Come on in," Bryan says, and waves them forward. The four men drop their hands and climb the steps.

*

To the travelers, the farmhouse is a sanctuary. It is old and needs repair, and sometimes it settles with long, low, ominous creaks, which easily startle them, because they are so used to staying alert for noises in the night—but it is lived in. It feels like home. Miller and Bryan show them the kitchen and a disused dining room, a few small bedrooms upstairs, most of them musty smelling and layered in dust. Before the sun sets, they give a tour of the small garden out back, where they've painstakingly begun to grow something almost like pre-war food. 

Almost. Close to.

When night comes, they come back inside and lock the doors. They sit around the kitchen table and trade stories.

Monty, who used to know something about computers, before most of the country's tech went silent, tips his bag upside down and spills an array of radio parts onto the table. He's been trying to put something together. He admits he doesn't quite know the point, but it's something to do, and maybe—he shrugs—maybe there's someone out there who will hear a message, if they can send it far enough into the unknown.

Bryan wants to know about the other survivors: if they've met anyone, and who. Bellamy does most of the talking. He tells them about Kane, who's sticking to the area around his old bunker, a way-station, now, for the travelers, and he says there are some. More than you'd think. He describes the abandoned properties they've stripped bare, the suburbs they've tentatively explored, the berries and the gourds growing out of the ground and from the trees, which they’ve gathered and eaten, nothing like what they used to know, and how sometimes they can't remember what the bounty of the Earth used to look like, can't remember what of the past is a dream and what is real.

To conserve their resources, they sit by the light of a single candle, in the middle of the table.

Murphy twists an apple around and around in his hand. "Can't believe you can still grow these things," he says. "You living in some sort of oasis, or what?"

Miller snorts. "Hardly."

The loose shutter bangs again upstairs. Bryan explains that they've already fixed it, more than once, but it never seems to stick. By now, the noise hardly even registers.

Jasper stays quiet, even more than the rest, and sometimes he glances out the window like he's waiting. Like he knows what's coming. He's always on edge, but it helps, the way that Monty reaches out sometimes and grabs his hand and holds it tight.

"So you've been living off irradiated nuts and berries this whole time?" Miller asks them, and Bellamy nods.

"Sometimes we find an old store of pre-war food no one ever got around to using," he says. "At first, we didn't want to eat anything that’s grown up since—we didn't know what it would be like."

"Maybe we'd start growing extra limbs," Murphy jokes. He sets the apple on the table and spins it around by its stem. A few of the others smile, thin and uneasy.

"But it was either that or starve" Bellamy adds. "So we took our chances."

“That’s smart,” Miller answers. “Because you would have starved.”

"Did you know," Bryan says, "that before the war, humans in general ate only a small percentage of the foods they could have eaten?"

"I've heard that," Monty admits. "Seems like a waste in retrospect, now that most of that’s gone, doesn't it?"

"And a lesson," Bryan answers. 

"So, what are you saying?" Murphy asks. "You'll eat anything, even if it glows?"

"I'm saying." He crosses his arms on the table and leans forward, and the light from the candle sends a new pattern of shadows across his face. "That I'm not going to waste away as long as there's food for me to eat. Any food."

A silence settles, then, broken only by the wind blowing outside and by Murphy's apple, still spinning, clunking down sometimes on its side against the table top.

"Please don't tell me," Jasper says into the quiet, the first time he's spoken since they came in from the garden, "that you're cannibals. Because I can't—"

Something thuds, a loud, empty sound, against the side of the house, and the four newcomers jump. Miller and Bryan look up sharply toward the source of the disturbance. Jasper's breathing so loudly and so hard that the others can hear him. In front of him, the candle flickers and threatens to gutter out.

"No," Bryan says. Then: another thud, louder than the first, and the distinctive scratching of nails, of very sharp and very long claws, against the side of the house. "That's not what I'm saying at all."

Even as he speaks, Miller's getting up from the table, heading to the doorway that leads to the front of the house. He reappears with his rifle. "Wait," Monty calls, as Miller opens the door—he has already seen the red eyes, six red eyes, glowing in a gap between the curtains, he can hear the snarl and snap of jaws out there in the near-silence of the dead night—but Miller doesn't hear him, or doesn't care to. Bryan reaches out and wraps his fingers around Monty's forearm, perhaps intending to comfort him, perhaps to hold him back.

_Do you eat the animals? Do you eat the new beasts of the Earth?_

Bellamy and his friends have come across unusual sights in the forests and the wilted fields. Large animal prints. Mangled animal bodies in unrecognizable shapes. And they've heard strange howls and crazed birdsongs and deep growling threats in the middle of the night, sounds that make them freeze beneath their blankets or in their makeshift beds, sounds that start their hearts beating too loud and cause a painful paralysis in their limbs.

Jasper covers his ears right before the gunshots sound: two in a row, fast and sharp. Then silence.

The slow drag of a large body across the ground. The steady thud of footsteps, thunk of raw meat up the steps. Bryan stands to open the door and let Miller back in.

He pulls the animal in after him and lets it lie, dead-eyed and bleeding, on the tile at the edge of the room. It is something like a wolf, but with three malformed heads and mangy, matted fur, and its eyes stare up at them without seeing, and everyone but Jasper stands to stare at it in return. 

“Let me guess,” Miller says, as he toes at it with his boot, glances around at the stunned faces of his visitors. "You’ve been running from them since you returned aboveground.” He leans his rifle against the wall, steps over the beast, and wipes his hands clean on a spare bit of rag next to the old sink. “You should know that it’s eat or be eaten in this world now.”

Jasper shakes his head. He’s looking down at his hands, though his eyes stare without seeing. “Not just now,” he says. “Always has been. In a way.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! 
> 
> This story has an accompanying moodboard [on my tumblr](http://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/179298184975/the-oasis-bellamy-murphy-jasper-monty-miller).


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